Amazon Allows Indians to Shop in Hindi

Amazon has gone beyond just English in one of the hottest markets for Internet in the world. This week the tech giant unveiled its version of a mobile website and app for Android in Hindi, which is the most popular language used in India and the mother tongue for close to 530 million people, showed the census of the country.

United States based tech companies have been attempting to attract customers across India, a country in which tens of millions used smartphones to access internet for just the first time.

Amazon said that it used a group of language experts as well as translators to choose the most common terms used and translated the words that make the website easier for readers of Hindi to navigate.

The aim of Amazon is ensure that any customer is able to find anything they are looking for on Amazon.in, anywhere and anytime irrespective of languages they speak or where they are from, said Amazon India’s VP of category management Manish Tiwary.

Amazon is not ditching English completely. While menus on mobile handsets and navigation are in Hindi, users across India are still able to search for Amazon products and read product reviews in English.

Amazon added that it was working on adding in other features that offer Hindi such as product ratings and reviews.

Hindi is not available yet on the iOS app of Amazon or on the desktop version of the website. Amazon added that it would let users know when those platforms had Hindi available but did not give any timeline.

Amazon, which Tuesday became the second company to ever exceed $1 trillion in market value, has poured billions of dollars into its business in India to compete with Flipkart a local rival which was purchased by Walmart earlier in the year.

The push into languages of India could be an important way in which the company captures the hundreds of millions of users who are using Internet for just the first time over the next few years.

Last year a study by KMPG and Google forecast that by no later than 2021 close to 536 million people in India would access Internet in their language compared to only 199 million users who are English speaking.